Football is heralded as the sport of the working class – huh. Listen to any objective Newcastle United, Manchester United, Liverpool, West Ham or Portsmouth fans (among other clubs) and they’ll tell you that for all their starry-eyed loyalty you don’t control what you don’t own.
Running a professional football club, like everything else in a capitalist society, is a business – big business – where the dictates of the profit and loss sheet rule supreme.
Top footballers may be overpaid and living a closeted lifestyle and some may be morally suspect or believe they are above the law when it comes to pub brawling, breaking the speed limit and their attitude towards women but they are still workers, people who sell their ability to work and are perfectly entitled to turn out for the team who “best meets their personal terms”. Where loyalty fits into this, that’s for the fans to decide.
It’s a different world since England won the 1966 World Cup – when Alf Ramsey walked the team back to their hotel through London streets the night before the final after they had been to the pictures and when the Italian team slept in Grey College halls of residence at Durham University. Or when Sunderland, the Second Division underdogs, beat the mighty Leeds United in the 1973 FA Cup final.
But I want to take you back even further to the greatest ever football story, when a team of working miners from West Auckland in south Durham went to Turin, Italy, in 1909 to compete in the inaugural World Cup – and won it.
What’s more, the “West” lads returned to Turin in 1911 when they stuffed Juventus 6-1 (yes, the Juventus) in the final to keep the spectacularly beautiful Lipton’s trophy in perpetuity.
Geoff Hurst’s World Cup final hat-trick quite rightly looms large in the collective memory, but let’s put the achievement of West into perspective: these were working miners from a north-east pit village playing against the best representative professional teams from Italy, Germany and Switzerland.
Why West were invited to Turin by Sir Thomas Lipton, the Glasgow-born tea magnate, has been lost in the sands of time. What we do know is that West were third bottom of the Northern League at the time and that the lads had probably never been out of the north east in their hardworking lives; they’d certainly never experienced the heat of the Italian sun or the culture of such a strange land.
1909: It was a time before flight, and telephones were few and far between, houses were still powered by gas and candlelight, working class houses had outdoor toilets and no hot running water, radio waves had been discovered but there were no broadcasting stations, the Titanic was three years away, the First World War was five years away and the Labour Party had yet to come into existence.
A train journey from West Auckland to Dover, a ferry to France and a train journey to Turin would have taken around three days. Two games in two days and another three-day journey home would quite rightly not be countenanced by footballers or fans today.
Yet these heroes did it and beat German champions Stuttgart Sportfreunde 2-0 in the semi-finals before seeing off the Swiss champs FC Winterthur 2-0 in the final.
The nature of coalmining at the time meant the lads didn’t know whether they had a job to return to – and they even had to pawn their belongings to get there.
West Auckland’s World Cup heroics comprise a heart-warming tale of David beating Goliath and the story took on even more resonance when in 1994 the original Lipton’s Trophy was stolen. Today an exact replica stands proudly in the West Auckland Working Men’s Club and people come from all over the world to pay homage to those plucky minnows.
This, however, wasn’t the first time the trophy had gone missing. The 1909 team left it on the platform at the Gare du Nord in Paris as they celebrated their victory. They were consequently paraded trophyless around West Auckland village green in a cart pulled by a horse. The cup followed a couple of days later, forwarded by a Parisian porter.
Sadly, the cost of the Turin trips meant the club has to sell the cup to the landlady of the village’s Wheatsheaf Hotel in 1912. She later moved to Liverpool and the cup was only “re-discovered” in 1960. It cost £100 to buy back the magnificent trophy.
In November 2008, Simon Stallworthy and Robin Byers of the Gala theatre in Durham, asked if my co-writer Trevor Wood and I fancied writing a play about West Auckland for the forthcoming centenary of the world cup win. It took us all of 10 seconds to say yes and Alf Ramsey Knew My Grandfather was born.
Humour is important to us and, as former amateur footballers, our aim was to capture the changing room camaraderie and banter of the memorable characters we’d played alongside.
We wanted to concentrate on the loyalty of these characters to each other, their club and their community as well as their journey to a country that was so culturally different from what they were used to; the weather, the food, the language, the pace of life, unfamiliar transport, wine and, not least, staying in a hotel with electricity. We also wanted to involve the women back home.
All this is magnificent drama for playwrights. The problem was it was about football. With the exception of Kes, portraying football on screen and stage is dull and artificial. Hence, when the brilliant Jeff Stelling of Sky television came on board we knew we were on to a winner.
Alf Ramsey opened to ecstatic reviews. Word of mouth was so enthusiastic it was soon playing to full houses, comprising men and women of all generations.
By the end of the 10-day run around 4,500 people had seen the show, including relatives of the cup winning teams. Some travelled from Blackpool and the south coast to Durham. One of them was Dave Thomas, the former Everton, QPR, Burnley and England winger. Dave’s grandfather was Ticer Thomas, a star of the 1909 team.
We also discovered that the winning captain’s 1909 medal was sold for £80,000 and is now housed in the Football Museum in Preston, and that the individual winners’ medals, of which only two are known, are worth many tens of thousands of pounds.
West Auckland today still play in the Northern League and are a thriving club thanks to the dedication of their excellent voluntary committee.
Philip Bernays, boss of the Theatre Royal in Newcastle, saw the show in Durham and was keen to bring it to the 1,200-seat venue in May, just before the World Cup.
The story of the West Auckland miners isn’t just a story about people from the north-east of England, it’s an inspirational story that should be embraced by football supporters nationally and internationally. Maybe the England World Cup squad should attend the show.
Alf Ramsey Knew My Grandfather is on at the Newcastle Theatre Royal from Tuesday May 11 to Saturday May 15. Tickets are on sale now
